Can I Leave and Cleave If We Live with My Parents?
00:00:00.000 | We get a slew of questions from listeners from Indiana to India.
00:00:09.120 | And this one comes from a listener named Ruby in Jaipur.
00:00:13.440 | Hello, Pastor John.
00:00:14.920 | Thank you for your sermons and for this podcast.
00:00:17.520 | I got married recently and here in India, culturally, a woman
00:00:22.220 | lives with the husband's family.
00:00:24.240 | What would you say about this in light of the multiple times where the Bible
00:00:28.480 | talks about a man leaving his parents to become one with his wife?
00:00:31.960 | What does this leaving look like in a marriage where he physically doesn't
00:00:36.900 | leave his parents' home at all?
00:00:38.080 | It's risky for me to speak with too much specificity across the miles and across
00:00:46.080 | the cultures into a situation that I know very little about culturally.
00:00:52.160 | So let me see if I can say some foundational things without too many
00:01:01.720 | specifics that might nevertheless give some clear guidance in this matter,
00:01:07.240 | because it really does have relevance.
00:01:10.080 | This question and the text she's referring to, it really does have
00:01:14.560 | relevance to every culture, mine, hers, even though some cultures make this
00:01:21.080 | word of Scripture more pressing than others.
00:01:24.200 | So here's the text.
00:01:25.200 | In Genesis 2, 23 and 24, Moses writes, just after God created the first
00:01:31.040 | woman from Adam's side, he said this.
00:01:33.160 | Moses said this, "Then the man said, 'This at last is bone of my
00:01:38.800 | bone and flesh of my flesh.
00:01:40.280 | She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man.
00:01:43.440 | Therefore," here's the key verse, "Therefore, a man shall leave his
00:01:49.560 | father and his mother and hold fast," we call it leaving and cleaving,
00:01:55.680 | "hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh."
00:02:03.160 | This command to leave mother and father is all the more remarkable because
00:02:11.200 | Adam and Eve didn't have any mother-father.
00:02:15.160 | Moses was taking this moment in the creation story to lay a foundation
00:02:22.800 | for all subsequent human life.
00:02:25.840 | That's very significant.
00:02:27.520 | And the three things he stresses are, one, leave mother and father; two,
00:02:33.440 | hold fast or cleave or be united in a new covenant relationship, new covenant
00:02:41.000 | relationship, not new covenant relationship, in a new covenant
00:02:46.120 | relationship with your spouse; and then third, become one flesh, which
00:02:51.680 | includes at least a new intimacy of sexual union, its depth, and all its
00:02:56.800 | fruitfulness.
00:02:58.360 | Then Jesus cites this verse, Matthew 19, 5, and Paul quotes this verse in the
00:03:09.480 | all-important passage of Ephesians 5, 31 and 32.
00:03:13.880 | So both Jesus and Paul recognize how foundational this sentence was in
00:03:20.360 | Genesis 2:24, and they reaffirm it for their day, I think our day as well.
00:03:26.440 | So Ruby is right to draw attention to this verse as relevant and indeed
00:03:33.280 | urgent, it sounds, for her situation.
00:03:37.800 | Now, the reason I call Ephesians 5 an all-important passage is because Paul
00:03:45.840 | more clearly than anyone in the Bible reveals the mystery that was present
00:03:56.080 | there from the beginning in Genesis 2.24, namely, the union of a man and a
00:04:03.000 | woman in marriage was modeled on the covenant relationship between
00:04:07.840 | Christ and his church.
00:04:09.680 | Here's the way he says it.
00:04:10.640 | This is Ephesians 5, 31.
00:04:12.960 | "Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife.
00:04:17.040 | The two shall become one flesh."
00:04:18.720 | This mystery is profound, and I am saying it refers to Christ and the
00:04:24.560 | church, and that's what gives such weight and lasting durability to
00:04:32.080 | Genesis 2.24.
00:04:33.680 | So in answer to Ruby's question, Ephesians 5, 23 to 33, that whole unit
00:04:41.240 | gives the best guidelines to the essence or the heart of what it means to leave
00:04:50.840 | mother and father and cleave to each other in marriage.
00:04:55.000 | And I think if we read it carefully, we can draw out at least four aspects of a
00:05:01.440 | marriage relationship that distances it from former participation in the
00:05:07.840 | household with mother and father.
00:05:09.320 | So here they are.
00:05:10.120 | One, there is now a new allegiance, devotion, affection, intimacy, priority,
00:05:18.040 | which is clearly implied in the analogy of Christ and the church.
00:05:23.080 | That's number one, a new allegiance.
00:05:24.640 | Number two, there is a new structure of responsibility for who bears the primary
00:05:31.040 | burden of providing materially for the family, namely the husband, not the
00:05:35.360 | father, not the wife.
00:05:37.280 | Of course, everybody in the clan, the extended family, all the more so in an
00:05:43.480 | agrarian culture, everybody's pitching in to make life work, especially in the
00:05:48.160 | agrarian society, but there is a unique responsibility falling to the new
00:05:53.280 | husband.
00:05:54.040 | Number three, there is a new structure of responsibility for who bears the
00:06:00.200 | primary burden of protecting the new family.
00:06:03.200 | Of course, the whole clan is important in providing protection, but there's a new
00:06:08.080 | special burden that falls not to the father any longer, that is the father of
00:06:13.880 | the groom, but falls to the husband in seeing to it that his wife and children
00:06:19.360 | are protected and safe.
00:06:21.080 | And number four, there's a new structure of responsibility for who bears the
00:06:27.800 | primary burden of providing leadership in this new unit of marriage.
00:06:33.880 | And hence Paul calls the husband the head of his wife as Christ is the head of the
00:06:40.400 | church, which has profound implications for how each of them relates to the
00:06:45.480 | generation that has just gone before, which used to embody so much authority.
00:06:51.480 | Those four new structures of allegiance and responsibility necessarily lead to a
00:07:00.040 | kind of leaving mother and father, leaving old structures of allegiance, old
00:07:09.040 | structures of provision, old structures of protection, old structures of
00:07:15.200 | leadership. At least that much is built into the very nature of what the New
00:07:21.400 | Testament describes as marriage.
00:07:24.400 | Now, what's not mandated with any explicitness or specificity is how much
00:07:33.240 | geography or distance, like 10 feet or 10 miles, must exist between this new unit of
00:07:42.760 | social life called marriage on the one hand and mother and father on the other
00:07:47.240 | hand. I would guess this is very different from culture to culture, depending on how
00:07:52.920 | clans and villages and cities and vocations are conceived in those cultures.
00:07:58.160 | So I think the principle would go something like this across all cultures.
00:08:03.680 | We may adapt to present cultural norms to the degree that they don't undermine the
00:08:13.640 | new structures of responsibility in marriage.
00:08:16.960 | And whenever there is a compromising or undermining of those new structures, we
00:08:24.560 | should be moving towards some cultural alteration in our living situation.
00:08:32.480 | So that's the best I can do without too much specificity.
00:08:35.160 | But let me close with one last thought.
00:08:37.320 | When Paul is thinking about taking care of widows in 1 Timothy 5, 8, he says, if
00:08:44.640 | anyone does not provide for his relatives and especially for the members of his
00:08:48.840 | household, he's denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.
00:08:52.080 | He's thinking about mom or grandmama, and her husband has died and she has no
00:08:59.280 | resources.
00:09:00.800 | So I don't think that leaving mother and father in the forming of a new family
00:09:07.040 | should mean a loss of care or a loss of thankfulness or a loss of respect, but
00:09:15.560 | that whatever distance happens, there should be some sense of ongoing
00:09:22.040 | responsibility that aging parents be taken care of.
00:09:25.800 | Amen.
00:09:27.160 | That's a good and helpful perspective.
00:09:28.720 | Thank you, Pastor John.
00:09:30.000 | And Ruby, thanks for the email question.
00:09:31.480 | And on a related note, we recently talked about caring for aging parents.
00:09:36.480 | That was in episode number 1078 titled Retirement Homes and Caring for Aging
00:09:42.040 | Parents.
00:09:42.480 | That was an episode we released back on August 9th.
00:09:45.080 | You can find that episode in our archives at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:09:50.840 | And there you can search our past episodes, browse them all, and check out
00:09:55.360 | all the many questions we have addressed over the years.
00:09:58.640 | Well, the apostle John tells us that there is a sin that leads to death and
00:10:04.640 | there's a sin that does not lead to death.
00:10:07.600 | So what's the difference between the sin that leads to death and the sin that
00:10:12.000 | doesn't?
00:10:12.560 | We'll look at 1 John 5, verses 16 to 17 on Monday.
00:10:18.160 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke, and we will see you then.
00:10:20.840 | Amen.
00:10:21.040 | Amen.
00:10:26.040 | [BLANK_AUDIO]